Patrick Emmenegger

This article examines the effects of migration experience on political attitudes in Central and Eastern European countries. The rationale for this quest is the hypothesis that contact with democratic contexts translates into democratic political attitudes, for which evidence is so far inconclusive. In this article, we are interested to see whether migrants returning from Western countries display different political attitudes than their fellow nonmigrant citizens. The analysis of survey data shows that migration experience diversifies the array of political attitudes: Although migrants are more likely to trust EU institutions and to try to convince friends in political discussions, they do not differ from nonmigrants in their attitudes toward domestic institutions. Based on earlier works on determinants of political attitudes, the authors argue that migration experience has a significant effect only when these attitudes are related to objects that are associated with improvements in the migrants' material and cognitive status.

A growing body of literature documents that under the economic and social pressures accompanying the post-communist transformations, governments in Central and Eastern European countries have been forced to change their spending habits. However, because most of these findings are based only on case studies or comparisons of a very small number of countries, it is difficult to observe to what extent the post-communist countries' development patterns share commonalities or develop in unique ways. This article explores in a quantitative comparative framework the effects of government composition, globalization, political institutions, and socioeconomic factors on total public, public social, and public education expenditures in twelve nation states. The authors find that the party composition of government has the most robust effect, in that left incumbency is positively correlated with total public and social expenditures. This result indicates that in this sense, post-communist countries are similar to Western democratic ones. The authors find only mixed results regarding the effects of globalization on public spending. This might suggest that globalization does not have a direct effect on the spending policies of these countries, but rather is mediated by domestic contexts